From the Metrics menu, choose the Basics command to display the Basic Metrics dialog box. It contains information about font size. The dialog box contains the following text boxes.
| Text box | Description |
| Characters , | ||
| First | The first character in the character set. This is the numeric character code of the first character for which the font contains a printable character. | |
| Last | The last character in the character set. This is usually 127 for a 7-bit character set, or 255 for an 8-bit character set. | |
| Default | The code of the character printed if the driver is asked to print a character that falls outside the range First through Last. | |
| Break | The character that delimits words in word wrapping. If an application or the DrawText function is asked to wrap a string in a box, it will break the string into multiple lines only at break character positions. This is generally the space character (32 in both ANSI and ASCII). | |
| Leading , | ||
| Internal | The leading that appears within the height specified by the height of the font. Diacritical marks appear in this space. | |
| External | The recommended additional space to insert between lines. This space is not already accounted for in the height of the font. | |
| Resolution , | ||
| Horizontal and Vertical | The number of dots-per-inch at which the font was digitized. For an HP LaserJet, for example, both of these numbers should be 300. | |
| Widths , | ||
| Average | For proportional space fonts, the average width of all the characters in the font. This box is relabeled “All” for fixed-pitch fonts, because all fixed-pitch characters have the same width. It is represented in font units. The PFM Editor does not calculate the average width from the width table; it must be explicitly entered. It is generally the width of the lowercase x. | |
| Maximum | The width in font units of the widest character in the font. Again, this is not calculated from the user-width table. For fixed-pitch fonts, this box is not used and is disabled. | |
| Height | The height in font units of the character cell, including internal leading. | |
| Ascent | The ascent in font units of the font. The distance from the top of the character cell to the baseline of the font. | |
With the exception of the width table for proportional fonts, this dialog box fills in the remainder of the Microsoft-defined font file header. All of these text boxes must be specified accurately.
There are also two buttons: OK, which carries out the changes in the PFM file, and Cancel, which ignores all changes made.